Teamviewer has a history of lying about serious security breaches. The company’s networks have been breached before and they literally spent years denying it and blaming it on their customers: https://www.securityweek.com/teamviewer-confirms-it-was-hacked-2016/

The worst of the medical centers that knowingly overcharged me was USC Keck in L.A. They completely ignored calls, emails, faxes and certified letters for nearly a year - never once responding to anything. The scumbags actually sent my account to collections despite my having a zero balance because they flatly refused to credit my overpayments. I’ve learned to refuse payment of any medical bill before making absolutely sure I owe the company what they are billing, and that can take months.

The thing that amazes me with all of these companies is they expect you and I to be right on top of our accounts, respond to letters and calls, and pay their bills within 30 days. This despite the fact they don’t give a fuck about doing the same. My attitude has become the same as theirs: “fuck 'em, let them wait”. I get sternly worded bills with red “Past Due” printed on them every month, ignore them completely and pay when I’m ready. There’s been no downside.

Doesn’t matter, it’s all of them.

It’s the majority of them, but there are exceptions. I switched to Blue Shield (not Blue Cross or one of the combined companies in some states) and had almost zero problems. They paid my claims accurately the vast majority of the time and fixed the occasional problem with relatively little fuss. The Blue Shield reps also knew their stuff and I never once had to explain my policy to them.

Health Net is deliberately designed from the bottom up to refuse legitimate claims and to fight tooth and nail when customers demand they follow their own contract. IMO Health Net should be shut down.

…my wife basically made this her daytime job calling about the bills and learning about how billing and coding works.

I had to do the same, despite recovering from surgery. To make matters worse, after I hit the maximum out of pocket amount the medical centers continued to send bills showing I owed a balance. It took nearly a year and repeated escalation to their executive and legal departments to get them to provide refunds. Calls, faxes and certified letters were completely ignored.

Corporate America has become quasi-legal and well-funded organized crime.

Name and shame - it does absolutely no good to post your experience without the insurance company name.

Health Net pulled constant bullshit with me. The company regularly refused payment on claims, saying they weren’t covered after previously paying for the same service under the plan. Health Net even went so far to refuse payment on a claim when they had provided prior approval for the appointment in writing. They would refuse payment on things that were clearly covered and I had to read them the policy to even get them to look at the denial. Health Net literally trashed prior authorization requests my doctor sent in and it took 4 months and personally faxing the request myself to get them to admit they were throwing the faxes away. The list goes on and on.

After major surgery I often spent 10+ hours per week on the phone with them because Health Net would deny so many claims. Getting rid of that crappy insurance company was a major relief.

Paypal locked my account after years of use for absolutely no reason. I never had a invalid charge, dispute, or any other kind of problem with it, just one day they decided to shut it down. They flatly refused to explain what was going on. With all the decent alternatives out there now there is no longer a reason to use their crappy service.

Love that they believe they’re the only game in town and can demand your bank statement.

HP has known the hinges are defective since they introduced them. There are so many people having problems a class action suit was filed about it.

Must depend on the model. I’ve been running Mint on that (repaired) X360 for years without significant problems outside crappy Realtek wireless module issues.

HP laptops are garbage. This is the hinge of my HP X360 laptop after 6 months of occasional use: https://i.imgur.com/LhZWBIt.jpg

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this doesn’t look like this has anything to do with Syncthing vulnerabilities. Instead it looks like a hack that uses a preconfigured Syncthing installation to transfer sensitive data. Disturbing nonetheless.

It’s also important to remember that Microsoft has no monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall.

With that in mind, there would be no reason for Microsoft to automatically enable Windows Recall in an update down the line. If it does happen, the user will be able to instantly tell thanks to that that visual indicator and turn it off again.

This article is nothing but propaganda. There is huge monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall and collect their data, and Microsoft routinely uses Windows Update to enable data collection. They began that practice years ago on Windows 7. It’s a ridiculously simple matter for MS to disable the visual indicator and force This Week’s Plan on their users to monetize their data.

Windows Central pretends to be critical of plans to enable a feature that can be made into malware by Microsoft in a couple of minutes, but then back peddles and says it can’t be done (utter BS) and if it could be, it wouldn’t be that bad.

The word is “bribes.”

A feature, not a bug of an oligarchy and an economy run by effective monopolies.

Rents in my area have gone up 60% in the past 4 years and lots of people I know can no longer afford to rent the homes they own, nor could they afford to buy them now. A fixed rate mortgage makes housing expenses stable for decades. That’s something that is almost never considered when comparing renting and owning.

Another tip: On Android phones, Tasker can be used to automatically activate Wireguard tunnels to your own or a commercial VPN host. Taskernet.com has one project that activates WG when off specific wifi networks, and another that I wrote that allows you to activate a tunnel on demand only when you open specific apps. Great if you want to access a home server occasionally (without detectable open router ports) or want an extra layer of security when running a financial app.

And the world was shocked because he is someone the law protects but does not bind.

Trump is currently being protected by Supreme Court justices who are literally deciding whether he’s bound by any law. You can bet that same conservative majority would make sure he’s protected by all of them.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. - Francis M. Wilhoit

Yet another reason to avoid the deep south.

Who are you talking to? Nobody has the power to do that

How embarrassing for you. If he is a member of a Bar association, he can be disbarred.

If you’re selling a product that you can’t produce by paying employees a lousy wage, you have to pay what’s needed to produce a salable product. This is the way business works everywhere and is true for both skilled and unskilled labor.

These companies have radically increased their prices while allowing the products produced to go to shit, and their customers are doing what customers always do when faced with crappy products and high prices. We’re going elsewhere.

Not only have the prices become absurd, the quality control has gone to crap.

For years we’ve taken regular road trips and use to stop at fast food places every single time. In the past 3 years we’ve repeatedly been served triple salted food, awful sub sandwiches, “cheese” burgers missing the cheese and condiments, and cold burger patties so old and dry they couldn’t be choked down. When you factor in the amount of waste due to the lousy food, the actual prices are way higher than what’s shown on the menu.

The ridiculous prices and regular bad experiences pushed us to a tipping point and we now find a grocery store along the way for deli sandwiches. It usually only adds about 5 minutes to the trip. Not only are the prices about 30% less but the food is consistently edible which makes the real price probably 1/2 of fast food places.

This is something we wouldn’t have taken he time to do a few years ago, so for us there’s been a big upside to the absurd prices and lousy food. We’re permanently changed our habits and cut fast food out of our diet completely. We are now spending less and getting consistently better quality, healthier food.

Maybe we should send “thank you” notes to the various fast food corporate headquarters.